National Bank of Greece

That's, that's great to hear that 'cause, you know, this is, uh, uh, when...

I, I often get asked when I'm speaking to bank boards, and, and I'm here this week in Greece working with the National Bank of Greece, and one of the classic questions I get is, um, you know, which is the best bank at the world in this? And they expect me to answer with one of the big banks out of China or maybe JPMC.

But of course, I'm always gonna be referencing someone like NuBank because, you know, the technical agility and cultural agility that you have allow you to do more things with AI.

Um, but I, I wanna just take a step back and jump into the US launch 'cause that's, uh, that's fresh on everyone's minds, um, from, from the perspective of NuBank.

and was lucky enough that actually a competitor of the various firms I'd worked for, rather than the firms themselves, was looking for some junior resource, doing a little bit of an experiment with cheap early 20s analyst resource, probably replaced by Claude these days, and got the opportunity to join a private equity firm called MBGI as they were launching their second fund.

Did a bit of work with them for a few years and on the back of steps largely due to the sovereign debt crisis with the end of being the G of NBGI being National Bank of Greece.

Ended up doing an MBA and came out the other side and via a couple of interim roles found this interesting little startup business at the time which was broadly the founding partners and then myself as first proper employee really.

called Connection Capital which was a high net worth funded so what we would now call probably an independent sponsor certainly in that in that mix very much PE focused at the time and then proceeded to be given far more far more rope than I deserved came out the other side unscathed through luck rather than judgment but did some good deals built a decent reputation and ended up there for 11 years as the first partner post the founders and eventually head of new business and running the private equity side of things there.

That's when anyone who's got money in the bank – I think Brazil was where this happened – is forced to lend it to the government on the government's terms i.e a low interest rate for a number of years with the promise they'll get it back but by the time they get it back it doesn't buy anything because of the inflation uh another another example is the um where they basically cap you uh we saw that in in cyprus for example recently a few years ago so basically anyone with more than a hundred thousand hundred thousand euros bad luck, it's gone.

It now belongs to the National Bank of Greece because otherwise all the banks would have been bust.

We also saw it in a certain sense with the Greek bonds, the Greek national debts.

I'm personally a victim of that.